Hi LW,
If I wanted to duplicate the packages from one machine to another then I'd like the method to not alter the source machine, preserve my choices, and that some packages weren't explicitly wanted. In other words, duplicate. ... ...could you explain what you do want to achieve ?
Well, I'm not the original OP but I have wondered about how to do this in the past. ‘pacman -Qqe’ lists the packages I've explicitly installed; call that set E. If the dependencies of those refer to a virtual package and I satisfied it in the past on machine A by choosing package P then I don't think that adds P to the explicitly installed set. On machine B, I want to explicitly install package set E and have the choice of P made automatically. I don't want to make P explicitly installed on either machine A or B because it is just a dependency. At every pick-a-package question on B, I could look on A to see how to re-make the same choice as before but that assumes A is available and is a tedious manual procedure. Hope that's clearer. Perhaps I've a faulty assumption early on which makes my problem disappear. -- Cheers, Ralph.